This morning I made a frightening discovery — Googlebot has been unable to successfully read any of the pages on my new ASP.NET web sites!!  UGH!  I made this discovery by accident, but I’m sure glad I did.  I was using the free Google Keyword Tool and decided to enter in the URL of a page on one of my sites.  Now, the thing you need to know is that my sites are written with ASP.NET and I’m using an open source URL rewriter call URLRewriter.Net so I can have meaningful URLs without actually having long URLs. 

So, I enter in one of my meaningful URLs into the Google keyword tool for it to analyze.  Instead of it displaying keywords about ipods like I expected it listed a bunch of "error, asp.net error, vpscript error, …" keywords.  That was not a good sign.  I did a few more tests and had the same results.  I did a few Google searches for URLRewriting and Googlebot and discovered that what I was seeing was not unique to me.  Sure enough, there is a bug in ASP.NET and I was being bitten hard by it.  The good news is that this explained why none of my pages were showing up in the Google index!

I did some more searches and research to find a solution.  Luckily I was able to find a posting by someone that came up with a very quick and easy way to solve the problem.  All I had to do was add an App_Browsers folder to my ASP.NET project, add a file call browserfile.browser with the follow contents:

<browsers>
<browser refID="Mozilla">
<capabilities>
<capability name="cookies" value="true" />
</capabilities>
</browser>
</browsers>

I did this, published my site, and re-ran my tests with the Google keyword tool.  The result was a thing of beauty! Needless to say I immediately made the same changes to my other ASP.NET sites and got those re-published as well.  Hopefully this means I will start to get some pages showing up in the Google index soon.

This was very frustrating for me to discover.  I had felt pretty good about my previous decision to use ASP.NET instead of PHP; but after running into this issue I’m not so sure it was a good decision.  The URL rewriting in Apache works without issue.  If I encounter another issue like this with ASP.NET I think I’ll have no choice but to rewrite my sites using PHP….COME ON MICROSOFT!!!

P.S. - A more detailed explanation of the issue along with a more complex solution can be found here and on the URLRewriter forum.

I can’t believe I haven’t written a blog entry on this topic yet. I could have sworn I did, but it must have been for a different blog or in a different life ;).  Anyway, I wanted to share with you a brief introduction to a great free blogging tool.

If you’re like me you have more than one blog.  Each blog is focused on a specific topic and hosted on different sites.  Some blogs may be hosted by a third party site like Blogger, while others are hosted on your own site using something like Wordpress.  Regardless, having multiple blogs to log into and maintain can become a pain.

Introducing: Windows Live Writer!

Okay, I know what you’re thinking…how can Microsoft have a blogging tool that’s worth using? Well, I admit to being a bit skeptical at first, but since it is free I figured I’d give it a shot. It didn’t take long for me to become a big fan of the tool. It’s not perfect but it certainly does make things easier for me.  It takes about 30 seconds to configure the tool for each blog that I have. I give it the URL for the blog, tell it what type it is (blogger, windows live, or "other"..which is Wordpress), and the username & password to log onto the admin of the blog. The tool does it’s magic and the blog is now available in the tool for me to post to.

Once the blogs are registered in the tool you can select one and create a new post or page.  I like the fact that it is just as easy to create a new page as it is a new post. For SEO purposes it is often better to create a new page vs. a new post (but more on that topic in a different post…er, page :).  The other nice feature is that you can create a post, post it to one of your blogs, and then select another blog site and post the same posting to that blog.  That’s pretty cool when you have multiple blog sites that you want the same (or slightly different) posts to go to.

So, if you want a good, free blogging tool check out Windows Live Writer.  And if you know of a similar free tool let me know!